My pictures are confused, abrupt, adamant, honest and entirely lacking in foresight. They are born from an argument between life's experiences, subconscious impulses and my own muddled aesthetic preferences; this dialogue is strained but ongoing. They are made possible only by the depth of my illness and the gift of my sobriety. I have accepted both graciously. They are, individually and as a group, an unwitting self-portrait.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Hillbillionare.

By Sylvie Simmons

Most people make mix tapes. Warren Hellman throws a music festival.

Warren Hellman ‘55 was driving home to San Francisco from Stinson Beach
a while back when he saw a woman hitchhiking. He pulled over. “I said,
‘Are you an axe murderer or anything?’
She said, ‘No, I’m OK, are you?’ So she gets in.” The car wove along
Highway 1 to the soundtrack of a classical CD. The woman asked him if he
liked classical music. “I said no, I like bluegrass. And she said, ‘Oh,
there’s this man in San Francisco who puts on the most unbelievable
bluegrass festival.’ I, being arrogant and conceited, said, ‘Do you know
who that is? It’s me.’ She grabbed my arm and started kissing it.”
Hellman grinned. “That was nice.”

Multimillionaire financiers don’t tend to receive such displays of
affection from strangers, at least not without payment. But over the
past ten years, the cofounder and chairman of private equity investing
company Hellman & Friedman, and scion of one of San Francisco’s
premier banking families, has become one of the best-loved men in the
city, particularly among the music community. And all because of his
passion for an instrument that gets about as much love as investment
banking: the banjo.
In celebration of the five-string (his is a 1909 White Lady), Hellman
founded, financed, and, with the help of Dawn Holliday and Slim’s, put
together the annual three-day music festival Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.
It all started in 2001 when Hellman was a mere lad of 67. He decided to
fly out some of his favourite acts, like high lonesome singer Hazel
Dickens and rock/country artist Emmylou Harris, to play a concert in
Golden Gate Park. Then he issued an open invitation to fellow
enthusiasts to join him at the show. Essentially it was the millionaire
equivalent of making and sending mix tapes; had Hellman been mad about
Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls, San Francisco might now have a Hardly
Strictly Synthpop festival.
At the outset it was called Strictly Bluegrass. “Emmylou agreed to come
the first year, and I really wanted her to play bluegrass—as you know,
she’s pretty catholic in her music—so I thought if I called it Strictly
Bluegrass she would be shamed into it. But no. We tried it again the
next year: No. So we changed the name to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and
as soon as we did, Emmylou started playing bluegrass.” Since then, the
festival has only grown bigger and more eclectic. Last year the
extravaganza featured more than 90 acts on six stages, ranging from
flat-picking guitar legend Doc Watson to rock poetess Patti Smith. And
best of all for concertgoers, the whole thing is free—no commercial
sponsorships even—paid for entirely out of Hellman’s pocket.
On a cabinet in his Financial District corner office, next to a stack
of CDs, is a framed photograph of Hellman posed with Emmylou Harris. On
the wall hangs a decade’s worth of signed festival posters. Propped on a
chair is a banjo. Were it not for the enormous desk, the people padding
about in business suits, and the wall of windows overlooking the Bay,
this might be the bedroom of an affluent Appalachian teenager.
One of the CDs in the stack is Heirloom Music, the new one by
longhaired cosmic-country star Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a regular at the
festival. Gilmore chose Hellman’s band, The Wronglers, to back him on
his new collection of old-time and traditional songs. Hellman had
recently returned from South by Southwest, the big music industry
conference and rock festival in Texas, where Gilmore and The Wronglers
played to packed crowds and enviable reviews.
“No one would have believed down in the bowels of Lehman Brothers doing
IPOs that I’d ever be up here on stage with Jimmie Dale Gilmore,”
Hellman told the audience in Austin’s Driskill Ballroom. Nor,
presumably, would Isaias W. Hellman, founder of the first bank in Los
Angeles and the first trust company in San Francisco, have believed his
great-grandson would be playing a banjo on stage while dressed in a
“Nudie”-style country-and-western jacket emblazoned with rhinestoned
Stars of David. (“Warren doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve,”
Gilmore joked.)
Hellman admits that finance runs in his blood more than music ever did.
“I never thought as a kid, ‘I’m going to be a musician’,” he said. “I
knew I was going to be an investment banker; it was hardwired. And it
was easy and fun. I’d sit with associates of Lehman and I’d say, ‘Why
don’t you do this?’ And they’d say, ‘That’s brilliant.’ Maybe that’s
what a good musician does: ‘Of course this is what you do; why do you
find that difficult?’ With music with me, it’s the opposite. I say,
‘Let’s do this’ and they all look at me.”
Hellman was 28 years old and working on Wall Street in the early
sixties when he decided to learn to play banjo. He bought Pete Seeger’s
banjo book, leafed through it, and got his secretary to track down
Seeger’s agent. “I called and said, ‘I’d like to take lessons from Pete
Seeger.’ The guy said, ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘No, I’m an important guy, an
investment banker.’ The guy said, ‘I’m going to hang up now.’ I said,
‘Oh no, please don’t. How do I take banjo lessons?’”
Finally he was given the name of a man in Greenwich Village, and for a
while Hellman was an assiduous student. By the time the family moved
back to San Francisco in 1985, however, he’d lapsed.
When he hit 70, Hellman felt the urge to start playing again and began
taking lessons with Bay Area–based string multi-instrumentalist Jody
Stecher. “[Warren] wasn’t a beginner, but he was pretty darn close,”
said Stecher. “He hadn’t played for a number of years, and at that age
your fingers have certain wear and tear, especially since horses are
always landing on Warren’s hands.” (Hellman is also a passionate
horseman who competes in gruelling Ride and Tie endurance races.) “But
Warren has a tremendous ability to concentrate and to apply himself.”
Rather than practice alone, Hellman played with three fellow students,
Nate Levine, Bill Martin, and Krista Martin. Augmented by Hellman’s
assistant Colleen Browne (a former indie rock musician), Hellman’s wife
Chris, and guest appearances by California fiddle player Heidi Clare,
the group became The Wronglers. The band’s motto is “Simple tunes played
by complicated people.”
Since forming, The Wronglers have played various clubs, folk festivals,
and community centers, but their biggest gig has always been in the
early fall in Golden Gate Park. Recent Hardly Strictly audiences have
been enormous—numbering between a half and three-quarters of a million
people (it’s hard to get an accurate count at a ticketless event). In
addition to playing with The Wronglers during their regular Sunday
morning slot at the festival, Hellman has performed on stage with
several of his heroes, including banjo wizard Earl Scruggs and the
aforementioned Emmylou Harris.
Country rocker Steve Earle, who along with Harris and others has become
an annual fixture of the festival, said, laughing, “It’s funny, Warren
comes from money and he’s made money of his own, and what he decided to
do with it was spend it on hillbillies. It’s interesting, me being as
radical and far-left as I am, and him being who he is, but through music
we found common ground. He gave me credit with turning him away from
the mainstream Republican Party under the Bush regime. I’ve been at the
festival since the second year, when all that was going on, and I never
shut up about it. When the Blue Angels used to fly over the festival I’d
get the whole audience to shoot the finger, and so was Warren.”
Hazel Dickens, with her songs about downtrodden workers and evil
capitalists, also found entente with Hellman. (Dickens passed away in
April, just a few months after participating in this article. She was
75.) “I thought that some of my songs might be offensive to somebody who
comes from a big corporation, but Warren just kind of laughs about it,
he finds it amusing,” she said. “Evidently he plays the music in his
office. It probably drives them people crazy.” She seemed quite taken
with that idea.
Rummaging through the CDs in his office, Hellman played one of her
songs, “The Mannington Mine Disaster,” about an explosion that killed 78
coal miners. “There’s a line that goes, There’s a rich man that lives on the hill, far from the poor miner’s home, for him everything is fine.
After about three months of knowing Hazel, she told me, ‘I think of you
as the man on the hill.’ Then a few years ago she gets up at the
festival and says, ‘If Warren goes on being so nice, I’m going to have
to change some of my songs.’”
Class divisions and political parties are largely beside the point, of
course. As Steve Earle observed, “This whole thing exists because of
something that transcends politics: Warren’s love of music.” For
Hellman, at least, it also transcends economics. He recalled a promoter
who approached him with an offer to acquire the event. “I said ‘Why
would you want to buy it? It’s free. Anyway, it’s not for sale.’”
And it’s not going away, either; Hellman, now 77, plans to fund Hardly
Strictly in perpetuity. “I always say, ‘Monet or a festival? If you had
the money, which would you rather own?’”
Then, as if in answer to his own rhetorical question, Hellman added,
“More than one person has described me as having no taste.”

Sylvie Simmons is a music journalist, author, and ukulele player. A Londoner, she moved to San Francisco in 2004, where she is MOJO magazine’s Contributing Editor.